How to manage entry fees, prize payouts, and other payments for a fishing tournament

Whether you’re running your local marina’s fishing club or a nation-wide, season-long competition series, fishing tournament payins, payouts, and taxes get messy. 

Even though we go fishing to escape the city, anglers have come to expect a high level of digital experience from the tournaments they take part in – real-time leaderboards, GPS-verified fish photos, and live weigh-ins.

Plenty of fishing tournament solutions help you manage the tournament itself on any level of sophistication. Payments, however, have historically been a weak point of these systems, often accepted as an unfortunate reality of life.

Handling payments for a fishing tournament used to be solved by adopting a mix of tools not suited for that use case which resulted in a process that turned off not only the organizers, but more importantly the potential participants, sponsors, and guests of the events. 

Payment Labs complements tournament management platforms with a dedicated purpose-built payment management solution that simplifies collecting payins and delivering payouts for fishing competitions of any scale. Let’s go over the key challenges competition organizers run into and what you can do to minimize the effort you spend on payments for your contest. 

What are the challenges of managing fishing tournament entry fees 

Expanding participant reach, onboarding sponsors, coordinating sites and logistics, engaging with the community, and introducing operational tournament improvements is challenging enough.

Passionate fishing tournament organizers are ready to do all that for their love for the art of fishing and the community. But with the wrong payments management setup, they end up becoming stressed out accountants wrestling with bulky spreadsheets and faulty payment processing. 

Many organizers end up giving up on throwing or scaling championships for their angler communities due to the dread of chasing down cash payments, distributing prize money, and having to sort out tax forms for hundreds of participants. 

Payment challenges that can throw wrenches into the works when organising fishing competitions, so you have to take them into account from the start. 

1. Collecting fishing tournament entry fees  - some of the anglers want to mail in checks (some of which will bounce), some will bring cash at the last minute, and the rest will try to use one of the myriad digital payment options. All of them may need live support should they get confused. Sorting out anglers’ issues and keeping track of all their data can discourage even the more motivated organizers. 
2. Fishing tournament prize payouts management - winners hate payout errors almost as much as they hate to wait for the prize they earned. Your payment gateway has to sync with your fishing tournament software to remove any need for manual payment reconciliation.
3. Systems integration challenges - payment systems not purpose-built for fishing competitions create time-consuming challenges when managing custom prize pool rules, fees, side pots, ties, and bonuses.  
4. Regulatory compliance and tax reporting - fishing tournament payouts must adhere to local, federal, and international regulations which depend on the scale of your event and the winner’s payout size. As a tournament organizer you are expected to support tax reporting for participants, but the right payment provider will collect all necessary personal data and generate compliant tax forms on autopilot.   
5. Excessive payment management time and effort - most fishing tournament organizers end up tracking their payment data in spreadsheets which unravels into a full-fledged job for an accountant. The more time a passionate organizer has to spend figuring out payments, the less energy they have to think through the tournament details. 

What do anglers expect from their fishing tournament organizers

In the US alone, there are over 50,000 fishing tournaments annually. They compete for entry fees from 74 million anglers. With the number of participants ranging from dozens to tens of thousands, the prize pools get increasingly tempting too (e.g. the Big Rock Blue Marlin Tournament recently had a purse of $5,835,705, the White Marlin Open Tournament - $10,509,679.)

Despite fishing tournament space booming, most competitions don’t have a fitting digital infrastructure to provide participants with a modern experience. But while organizers may think that their early 2000s setup is still good enough, their target audience has come to expect more. 

Things like real-time leaderboard, fish geo-coding, live weigh-ins, dedicated mobile apps, multi-species results tracking, bracket management, tournament series analytics, and strong anti-cheating measures have become a must-have to reach and attract more of amateur and professional anglers. 

All these features are important to create an engaging tournament experience, but in the end it’s all about catching the biggest/most fish and getting the prizes paid out quickly and fairly. 

How to set up a payment management process for your fishing tournament 

Generic payment processors aren’t built to handle complex prize distributions and nuanced entry fees management. Using a solution not purpose-built for tournaments creates more issues than it solves due to unnecessary friction and miscommunication between the event management platform, payment gateway, and the participants. Here’s what an organizer needs in order to offer tournament participants a smooth payment process.  

1. Payment gateway adapts to your tournament’s rules and structure removing any need for manual reconciliation of fees and prizes.
2. All money movement from registration to prize distribution is done through one compliant and safe payment solution.
3. Automated prize calculation and distribution based on tournament results.
4. Built-in tax reporting that simplifies compliance for participants.
5. Multiple payout methods to allow winners to receive money domestically and internationally without hidden fees and delays.
6. Human support available through multiple channels for immediate resolution of issues.

Why PayPal, Stripe, and Venmo don’t cut it for tournament payments management

Tools like PayPal, Venmo, and Stripe, while good for ad hoc peer-to-peer payments, can’t address the tournament organizers' payment management needs. 

• P2P solutions aren’t designed for complex tournament payout logic.
• No built-in tax compliance
• Only support manual prize payments
• No dedicated support for your tournament participants

Why choose Payment Labs for fishing tournament payment processing

The backend of fishing tournament payment processing is about as convoluted as a tangled fishing line – fragmented payment systems, conditional prize distribution rules, compliant tax forms generation, fees management, software integration or compatibility challenges, and much more.

When you’re organising a fishing competition or a series, you have a lot on your plate without having to become a financial technology wiz. We’re taking on all the challenging parts of payments management so you can focus on your anglers and fans of the sport. Here’s what you get when you integrate Payment Labs with your tournament management software.

1. Unified payment dashboard to track all the incoming and outgoing tournament payments.
2. Automated collection and validation of W-9 and W-8 forms and generation of 1099 and 1042-S forms.
3. Multiple payment methods for payins and payouts. 
4. Seamless integration with your tournament management platform, CRM or other back-office tools like QuickBooks or NetSuite.
5. Audit-ready reporting and transaction logs.
6. Human support for you and your clients available via WhatsApp, iMessage, email, and Slack. 
7. The lowest available payment and currency exchange fees. 
8. Fishing tournament payments infrastructure compliant with the US and international regulations.

Payment Labs specializes in solving all payments challenges for fishing tournaments as well as leading esports, sports, creator economy, and NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) projects.  The platform allows you to manage entry fees, prize payouts, sponsorship deals, and any other payments your tournament may require.

How to integrate Payment Labs into your tournament management process

Payment Labs is built to simplify and automate payments, taxes, and compliance for organizers and participants of fishing competitions. And it starts with a simple integration process that frees up your energy and mental capacity to focus on organizing your competition and attracting anglers. 

1. Get in touch with our team to clarify your payment, tax, and compliance needs.
2. Set up your business account with Payment Labs.
3. Let our experts handle the API integration with your tournament management platform.
4. Set payin and payout rules for your fishing tournament or series
5. Onboard participants, and monitor payment processing in real time.   
6. Store sensitive financial data with Payment Labs to safely consolidate payments data for compliance reports.

Simplify your fishing tournament payment processing

Fishing tournament organisation and management is hard enough. Payment Labs frees up your focus and energy for gathering the best angler talent, developing the competition rules, and marketing your event to sponsors and visitors.

Our purpose-built payments solution integrates with your existing infrastructure and orchestrates all your payins, payouts, compliance, taxes, and even customer support. Contact our team to discuss your tournament and learn how we can solve payments for you once and for all.